Is it not easier for a person to write their feelings down on paper? Sometimes authors feel the same way and reflect how they feel or their life story through fictional characters and events throughout their novels. After reading the popular novel, The Call of the Wild, written by Jack London, it was apparent to me that he should his life story through the life of the main character in his book. Thus, London's story, The Call of the Wild, is a mirror image of his life. .
Buck, the main character of Jack London's novel, loses his family in the first chapter of the novel; similarly Jack London began living on his own at the young age of fourteen. In the beginning of the novel, Manuel, one of the gardener's helpers, leads Buck to a train station and sells him away. Like Buck, London was also strayed away from his family at an early age. As the interdiction of the novel states, "From the age of fourteen until the day of his death, he was self sufficient, working a variety of jobs". Dropping out of 8th grade when he was fourteen is much like Buck being forced to leaver his comfortable surroundings in California. School was the comfortable surrounding for Jack but his family's impoverishment had forced him to drop out and work in a fish cannery. There are also other similarities throughout the novel. For example, they both faced harsh environments after leaving home.
Both Jack and Buck lived in an environment where there was a struggle for survival in the second chapter of Jack London's novel. The title of the chapter was "The Law of Club and Fang" which refers to how much fighting there was; the more the dogs fought, the more they were threatened and hit with the club. London spent most of his life "surviving" as well. He worked odd jobs and even spent a year "hoboing" across the country with "coxey's army of the unemployed." London even spent a year in prison where he started writing about his belief in Darwinism.
